Petitions for habeas corpus before the
California Supreme Court tend to have
fairly long and legalistic titles, such as “Due
to the Pattern of Witness Intimidation,
Petitioner was Denied His Right to a Fair
Trial Under the 14th Amendment of the
U.S. Constitution.” The document filed
by attorney Charles M. Sevilla in 1987,
petitioning for the release of Herman
Martin, an insurance executive who was
convicted of murder, was an exception.

It said simply: “Something Is Wrong.”“That’s a very unusual title for alegalistic pleading,” says Sevilla, of theLaw Office of Charles Sevilla. “But I feltsomething terrible had taken place in thiscase. A lot of information never came outin the trial, including that the defensewitnesses were intimidated by the lawenforcement investigator, and I needed todo something unusual to get the clerk’sattention because the case had alreadybeen appealed and lost.”The gambit worked. Martin’s convictionfor second-degree murder was overturnedbased on misconduct by law enforcement,and Martin, after pleading guilty tovoluntary manslaughter, was releasedfor time served. “Later,” Sevilla says,“someone in the attorney general’s officetold me the petition got their attentionbecause the title was so unusual.”Those three words—“Something IsWrong”—capture both Sevilla the slywordsmith, who has penned two satiricnovels about a bamboozling lawyer, andSevilla the voice of moral authority, whoinstructs other lawyers about ethics.Criminal defense attorney Bob Boyceechoes a common sentiment when he callsSevilla “the lawyer I would turn to if I was introuble [with a case].”Would and has. Five times, between1985 and 2008, Boyce asked Sevilla tohandle appeals of his cases; four timesSevilla has won. “In all four cases [that hewon],” Boyce says, “I really believed in theclients, and I was devastated and bleedingall over the courtroom after we lost. I thinkof Chuck as the Mr. Wolfe character in PulpFiction, the fix-it guy who John Travolta andSamuel L. Jackson call when they have abody in the trunk. When I have a mess onmy hands, I call Chuck.”All four cases involved headline-grabbing legal issues—prosecutorialmisconduct; jury misconduct; doublejeopardy; and failure of the court to allowimpeachment with Myspace materials.